dj bean

Bruins are winning, but they aren't peaking

They're the No. 1 team in the Eastern Conference, a legitimate contender for the President's Trophy (the only trophy in the league that should always followed by "Who cares?") and are picking up two points every time they take the ice.

Yet just as it's silly to dwell on the lows with this team during the regular season, one shouldn't get too carried away with the eight-game winning streak on which the Bruins currently find themselves.

"I hope we’re not peaking right now," Milan Lucic said after Saturday's 5-1 win over the Hurricanes. "We need to keep wanting more and we’ve done a good job of staying on course and getting focused on the task and hand."

The argument here is that the Bruins aren't peaking too soon because they aren't peaking. Many of these games -- Thursday and arguably Saturday, for example -- probably could be better categorized as games they found ways to win rather than dominant performances.

"If [Lucic] thinks we're peaking too soon, I can show him a lot of areas where we can get better," Claude Julien said with a grin. "That's not hard for me to find.

"I don't think we're doing things to peak too early. I think we're utilizing our players, our bench as much as we can, giving guys some rest and all that stuff. We're doing the best we can."

If you want to talk about peaking too soon, you can talk about the 2011-12 team, when the B's went balls to the wall starting in November with a ridiculous 21-2-1 run, leaving them just enough to get bounced in the first round against the Capitals. That isn't what's going on here.

Take Saturday, for example. The B's got three goals in the final 10 minutes of the game, but up until that, it was a serious contest. Boston came out skating well, but the team was inexplicably sloppy with moving the puck -- particularly coming out of their own zone.

That could have cost the B's in the first, when a Chris Kelly breakout attempt was picked off by Alexander Semin, who took the puck to the net and was stoned by Chad Johnson. With the game well out of hand in the third period, the B's also gave up their fifth breakaway in the last five games when Nathan Gerbe snuck past the defense and hit the post.

Defensively, it's obviously been something of a feeling-out process, as the Bruins added two defensemen to the roster last week and have had a few different looks depending on whether Andrej Meszaros was playing the right side, left side or out of the lineup altogether.

Yet through any sloppiness and breakaways given up, the B's have managed to keep their opponents quiet offensively. They haven't allowed a first-period goal in their last seven games and haven't allowed a goal until the third period of their last three games.

Add all that up and you have a team that hasn't had to play from behind a lot. Factor in that the B's are the fourth-best offensive team in the league and you have a pretty good recipe to come out of these games with two points.

"That's always been important for us to manage the side of the puck when we don't have it," Julien said. "Our guys right now are committed fairly well, but again, you look at another breakaway again today. That part of it we have to continue to work on, and it's not just about defensemen. Sometimes we don't have the forwards giving us our layers, so there's an area there I can show the guys if they think they're peaking too early."

Another thing to consider with this win streak is the competition. The Bruins have put this win streak together during a hectic time in their schedule, but one in which they don't face the most difficult opponents. Only three of these eight games have been played against teams who were in line for a playoff spot as of Saturday afternoon: the Rangers, Lightning and Canadiens.

That isn't a knock on the Bruins, of course. Teams can only play the teams they're scheduled to play, and Boston's play has certainly been better since a brief post-Olympic dip.

The B's are more physical, for one, and that's one of the areas that in recent games has looked to be playoff-ready. Lucic has been a bull, and even Dougie Hamilton, a player with size who wasn't overly physical in his first season and a half, is hitting players hard. Hamilton crushed Carolina forward Jeff Skinner with an open-ice hit in the Boston zone Saturday.

"I think we can be pretty intimidating when all four lines are rolling, and forechecking hard, and hitting, it puts the other team on their heels," Hamilton said after the game. "I guess our team’s pretty good at that. We when play hard and hit and move our feet, I think we’re pretty good."

Lucic's thoughts on Hamilton's hit were a little more concise.

"Awesome," said. "He's a big man, right? He should be doing that."

The Bruins should feel good about their game right now. Their defense is slowly but surely improving and their offense is really, really good. Both goaltenders are going well and the team has the best record in the conference to show for it.

They're playing well, but they could suffer a loss on any given night and they -- rightfully -- probably wouldn't see it as being a big deal. It's the regular season. There's definitely another gear to reach for the postseason, and the Bruins shouldn't be desperate to reach it in March.

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